The making of England’s referee crisis: ‘Corinthian Spirit’, trickle-down abuse and misguided punditry
Hello, Luke here. As part of my master’s degree, I wrote a three-part series covering referee abuse in English football. This is the second chapter: I published part one yesterday, with the final section scheduled for tomorrow.
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England’s football culture once represented the gold standard other nations aspired to recreate.
On the island where the sport was born, football still dominates the landscape, with provincial clubs shaping communities from coast to coast, but its cultural relevance is slipping.
Although the depth of the non-league pyramid remains the world’s envy, a corrosive climate is stripping the nation’s footballing heritage of its international prestige.
Referees are blowing full-time on their careers at all levels of the sport, driven away with increasing regularity by abuse in the post-lockdown era. According to the University of Portsmouth, match official numbers have dived by a third since 2016, dropping to 23,000 at the start of 2021-22.
Stuart Carrington, an expert on referee psychology, says football’s abusive relationship with match officials is rooted in its history.
When asked if mistrust of whistle-wielders is a key factor in their abuse, Carrington answers: “The short answer is yes and there are two reasons why: attribution and history.
“When we don’t achieve our goals, we tend to attribute failure to factors that are outside our control. Luck, in other words. The reason for that is it then makes sense for us to carry on participating because we’d give up if our ability was the main reason for our losses.
“Secondly, we can’t disassociate our psychology from our sociology and history: they’re all connected. And that mistrust [of referees] stems from Corinthian football when captains would make the decisions.”
Corinthian Spirit, named after a club of the same name, governed the field before football was transformed into a professional pursuit in 1891. Captains settled officiating decisions before neutral arbiters were introduced, a system discarded once the values of “sportsmanship and amateurism” were overtaken by competitiveness and zero-sum gaming.
Much to their horror, gentlemanly footballers of the nineteenth century discovered that cheating had its merits.
“When the sport was professionalised, and there was money at stake, [refereeing] evolved because the captains didn’t trust each other – meaning the modern referee comes from a place of mistrust,” Carrington explains. “From the perspective of the players at the time, a referee’s presence suggested that they would lie or cheat. They didn’t like it.”
There is a stark contrast between yesteryear’s quaint sportsmanship and the brutal gamesmanship that defines elite football today. In the pre-referee era, the Corinthian FC squad took it upon themselves to intentionally miss penalty kicks as “a gentleman would never commit a deliberate foul on an opponent.”
Luis Suárez, meanwhile, is revered in his native Uruguay for committing an egregious handball to prevent Ghana from becoming the first African nation to reach the final four of a World Cup. Asamoah Gyan thumped the crossbar with the resulting penalty, albeit not out of the Corinthian Spirit.
Today, winning is all that matters, as Suárez proved with his disregard of the rules at the World Cup.
In the Netherlands, development is prioritised over competitiveness in youth football, with goalkeepers specialising in their position years after their counterparts across the continent. Emphasizing learning opportunities for junior players has created a unique culture and is part of the reason why Dutch referees are almost half as likely to experience abuse as their English colleagues.
However, Professor David Hancock, an expert in officiating from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, is not convinced that importing a feature of the Dutch system would lead to wholesale cultural change.
“Kids will always know what the score is and competition is one of the big reasons why they’re drawn to the game,” he says, imagining how the proposal would work in ice hockey, the sport he officiates.
“If you want to reduce abuse and stop it before it really becomes a culture, you need to implement active policies that target behaviour rather than just changing what attracts kids to play in the first place.”
Professor Hancock’s position is not unique. Dr Duncan Mascarenhas, a sports psychologist from Edinburgh Napier University, says football’s issues “cascade downhill” and must be tackled at the elite level first.
“It’s cultural and starts at the top: watching players on TV behave in a certain fashion creates a framework that allows players to act the same way when they’re out on the park,” he explains. “We watch players verbally abuse officials and that seems to be accepted: why would anyone get involved in something like that?”
For several decades, research showed that would-be referees ventured into the world of officiating for their love of the game – not financial gain or the prospect of promotion. However, intrinsic justifications are breaking down in light of widespread abuse, says Professor Hancock.
“There’s been a major shift over the past five years: referees were previously intrinsically motivated to start and governing bodies thought ‘this is great, we don’t have to alter much because people are coming’ but that’s changed.
“Governing bodies need to realise that intrinsic reasons might be enough to draw someone in but it’s not enough to keep them: they need to feel organisational support.”
Professor Hancock believes that governing bodies should do more to create a collegiate atmosphere within their sports, arguing that humanising referees is key to turning the tide against abuse.
Stuart Carrington, an associate professor at St. Mary’s University, agrees, adding that it would beneficial if players, coaches, and pundits improved their grasp of the laws of the game.
“Analysts on TV frequently cite laws that don’t exist and it drips down,” says the author of Blowing the Whistle: The Psychology of Football Refereeing.
“Discussions that TV pundits often have aren’t in light of the actual rules. The number of times I hear ‘they played the ball’ makes me pull my hair out: the ball isn’t mentioned anywhere in the laws of the game except the section about what size it should be.”
“There needs to be a greater level of education about what the laws actually are and [for pundits to] then talk about why the official has interpreted the rulebook in that way. That would clear a lot of situations up and the Champions League final is a great example.”
Days earlier, coverage surrounding the richest match in club football descended into chaos, with BT Sport’s star-studded squad of former professionals bewildered by a correctly disallowed goal.
Following a lengthy discussion amongst the channel’s pundits, former referee Peter Walton stepped up to the microphone and explained the decision: Karim Benzema’s strike was rightly deemed offside.
Rio Ferdinand, the former Manchester United centre-back, instinctively made light of Walton’s intervention, raising an eyebrow before moving on to his next point.
However, it’s no surprise that England’s football pundits are sceptical of referees and their decisions. Unlike in Germany, where journalists play a leading role, former professionals dominate the nation’s broadcast media, projecting their negative perceptions of officials into homes and pubs across the land.
As a result, detoxifying the relationship between elite-level referees and players presents an opportunity to reset England’s decaying football culture.
“Players want officials to be approachable, humble and honest,” Dr Mascarenhas explains, with increased urgency. “They don’t want them to be dismissive, domineering, or arrogant.
“I guess the simple way to think about it is ‘would you like to hang out with this person?’ – if referees tick those boxes, players are more likely to warm their decisions because research shows they’re influenced more by what they think of the person than their calls.”
Dr Mascarenhas, a touch-rugby referee, argues clear communication is key to fixing football’s cultural crisis and points to sports where spectators can hear the referee as the model to follow.
“It’s a bit of a political question,” he says when asked if football could learn from rugby’s management of abuse, “but bringing in an open microphone system would help alleviate those problems because it would enable everyone to know the reasoning behind decisions.
“I’m not saying that rugby has got it totally right, but open microphones at the top of the sport are important because [culture] cascades through the game.”
Although a return to the Corinthian Era is off the cards, there is hope that cultural change will reach England’s national sport. It will take years, possibly decades, but football will eventually have to show referee abuse the red card. If it doesn’t, there won’t be any match officials left to protect.
This was a very interesting read, if there was one thing you could change about football to stop abuse - what would it be?